Windsor's forestry department is battling a massive tree trimming backlog, with waits up to a year and a half in residential areas.
There's an estimated 3,500 work orders needing to be completed in Windsor.
The arrival of the emerald ash borer in 2002 became the root cause of the backlog we're seeing today, city forester Paul Giroux says. The beetle is highly destructive to ash trees and forced the city to spend a lot of their time removing more than 7,000 ash trees that were killed.
"For years — six, seven, eight years — a lot of resources were spent cleaning up the streets of Windsor, making the streets safe ... and focusing less on the preventative work," he says.
However, Giroux says the lengthy wait times don't apply in all cases.
"If the tree inspectors assess the tree and the tree has immediate concerns than obviously we would make that a priority and the tree could be trimmed as early as that week to three to four months down the road," Giroux adds.
The other issue at play is that 85% of the work orders are from the Forest Glade area, where trees have never been trimmed since the neighbourhood was built.
"It's a neighbourhood where all the trees were planted at the same time and for whatever reason, perhaps just due to restructuring of dollars, they've never been trimmed," he says.
Giroux predicts all trees in Forest Glade will be trimmed within the next six months, which will put the number of work orders in a "manageable " state.
For the first time ever Windsor is using two contractors to help city crews try and make a dent in the backlog.
By 2017 Giroux hopes to be back on track, breaking the city in seven zones and each section would be trimmed each year. The aggressive plan may require some additional money, but Giroux is unsure how much that may be.
